Kyoto - 'till I get lost

One last story about Kyoto before we move on to Hiroshima.

On the day we saw the thousand and one Buddhas we did a lot of walking. We walked from our hotel down a couple of blocks to the train station, then ten minutes to the temple, through the temple, in and around the National Museum, and then began an ill-fated quest to find another temple I had heard about.

By the time we headed back toward our hotel, my feet hurt and I was tired of walking. We decided to take the subway back to Kyoto train station.

Sadly, we ended up on the wrong train, confused by the map full of stations with names we'd never heard.

As we stood, swaying with the rhythm of the train, a little old Japanese man came up to us and said "Hello, welcome, welcome to Kyoto."

"Well, thank you." Grant said, with that slight southern twang that always makes me think of Elvis videos.

He asked us where we were from, we told him the United States. He said, "I visited your country. I was there three years."

Apparently, this old man had seen a lot in that three years. He talked about New York. He claimed that Maine was very small. I couldn't correct him. I just couldn't.

He said the trains were very bad in America, not nice, fast trains like in Japan. "You should build a train from Boston to Washington, D.C. when you get back to America."

Grant agreed. Strangely we'd just talked about that while on the Bullet Train to Kyoto. "Maybe when you are President. He could be President." The old man said to me. His eyes laughed.

He asked where Grant was from. Grant, of course, said Texas, though he hasn't lived there since he was a toddler. "Near Houston"

"I went to Texas," the old man said, "When I was in your country. I saw a very sad thing there."

I thought he was going to tell us about a car accident, or a family who was homeless, or some other tragic, but commonplace part of American life.

"Your President, Mr. Kennedy was shot. The police question me. They ask me what I saw. The shot came from the school book building. A very sad thing."

Grant and I nodded in sympathy and looked at each other, our eyes said, is he serious, was he really there?

We got off at the next stop. On the train ride back to Kyoto Station, I couldn't stop thinking about that old man. Did he really witness the Kennedy Assassination? Was he really standing in the crowd when someone shot an American President? Did he make the story up? Why? Did we misunderstand?

I leave you today with a quote from Napoleon Bonaparte, "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."